Title
Topic
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‘Project-Based Activities to Introduce Hardware in a Software-Focused Course’
“This workshop introduces attendees to the low-level components used in the design of computer hardware, allowing them to experiment with the hardware-software interface. Attendees explore hands-on experiments that are designed for students unlikely to encounter hardware topics in their course of study. These experiments are offered in bridge courses of a graduate program enrolling students without a Computer Science background at Northeastern University (the Align MSCS Program). The workshop consists of 3 groupings of hardware experiments. In one grouping, attendees use breadboarding to construct digital circuits.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the SIGCSE 2024 proceedings.
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‘Fully Dynamic Matching: (2-√2)-Approximation in Polylog Update Time’
“We study maximum matchings in fully dynamic graphs, … graphs that undergo both edge insertions and deletions. Our focus is on algorithms that estimate the size of maximum matching after each update while spending a small time. … We show that for any fixed ɛ > 0, a (2 — √2— ɛ) approximation can be maintained in poly(log n) time per update even in general graphs. Our techniques also lead to the same approximation for general graphs in two passes of the semi-streaming setting, removing a similar gap.” Find the paper and authors list in the 2024 Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium…
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‘A Retrospective Study of One Decade of Artifact Evaluations’
“Reproducibility is a vital property of experimental and empirical research, without whichit is difficult to establish trust in derived conclusions. If results cannot be independently confirmed, they may be affected by observer bias or other confounding factors. As the full-scale reproduction of scientific results from a study takes significant time, which does not match well with the conference-focused publication in computer science, a lighter quality assurance mechanism for scientific work has been established. … After a decade of artifact evaluations, we analyze the impact they have had on published articles and artifacts.” Find the paper authors list at Software Engineering…
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‘The Arrangement of Marks Impacts Afforded Messages: Ordering, Partitioning, Spacing and Coloring in Bar Charts’
“Data visualizations present a massive number of potential messages to an observer. … The message that a viewer tends to notice — the message that a visualization ‘affords’ — is strongly affected by how values are arranged in a chart, e.g., how the values are colored or positioned. … We present a set of empirical evaluations of how different messages … are afforded by variations in ordering, partitioning, spacing and coloring of values, within the ubiquitous case study of bar graphs.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
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Mid-Atlantic Topology Conference held at Northeastern
The 2024 Mid-Atlantic Topology Conference was held at Northeastern University in late March, 2024. The conference was sponsored by professors Ben Knudsen, Iva Halacheva and Jose Perea in the department of mathematics.
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‘ICML 2023 Topological Deep Learning Challenge: Design and Results’
“This paper presents the computational challenge on topological deep learning that was hosted within the ICML 2023 Workshop on Topology and Geometry in Machine Learning. The competition asked participants to provide open-source implementations of topological neural networks from the literature by contributing to the python packages TopoNetX (data processing) and TopoModelX (deep learning). The challenge attracted twenty-eight qualifying submissions in its two month duration. This paper describes the design of the challenge and summarizes its main findings.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Proceedings of Machine Learning Research.
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‘”The Wallpaper is Ugly”: Indoor Localization Using Vision and Language’
“We study the task of locating a user in a mapped indoor environment using natural language queries and images from the environment. Building on recent pretrained vision-language models, we learn a similarity score between text descriptions and images of locations in the environment. … Our approach is capable of localizing on environments, text, and images that were not seen during training. One model, finetuned CLIP, outperformed humans in our evaluation.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication proceedings.
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‘Multi-Instance Randomness Extraction and Security Against Bounded-Storage Mass Surveillance’
“Consider a state-level adversary who observes and stores large amounts of encrypted data from all users on the Internet, but does not have the capacity to store it all. Later, it may target certain ‘persons of interest.’ … We would like to guarantee that, if the adversary’s storage capacity is only (say) 1% of the total encrypted data size, then even if it can later obtain the decryption keys of arbitrary users, it can only learn something about the contents of (roughly) 1% of the ciphertexts.” Find the paper and authors list at Theory of Cryptography.
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‘Code Coverage Criteria for Asynchronous Programs’
“Asynchronous software often exhibits complex and error-prone behaviors that should be tested thoroughly. … Traditional code coverage criteria do not adequately reflect completion, interactions and error handling of asynchronous operations. This paper proposes novel test adequacy criteria for measuring: (i) completion of asynchronous operations in terms of both successful and exceptional execution, (ii) registration of reactions for handling both possible outcomes and (iii) execution of said reactions through tests.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
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‘Increasing the Responsiveness of Web Applications by Introducing Lazy Loading’
“Front-end developers want their applications to contain no more code than is needed in order to minimize the amount of time that elapses between visiting a web page and the page becoming responsive. However, front-end code is typically written in JavaScript … and tends to rely heavily on third-party packages. … One way to combat such bloat is to lazily load external packages on an as-needed basis. … In this work, we propose an approach for automatically introducing lazy loading of third-party packages in JavaScript applications.” Find the paper and authors list in the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Automated…
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‘Testing the Limits of Neural Sentence Alignment Models on Classical Greek and Latin Texts and Translations’
“The Greek and Latin classics, like many other ancient texts, have been widely translated into a variety of languages over the past two millennia. … Aligning the corpus of classical texts and translations at the sentence and word level would provide a valuable resource for studying translation theory, digital humanities and natural language processing (NLP). … This paper evaluates and examines the limits of such state-of-the-art models for cross-language sentence embedding and alignment of ancient Greek and Latin texts with translations into English, French, German and Persian.” Find the paper and authors list in the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2023…
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‘Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora: Commonly Copied Texts as Distant Supervision for Handwritten Text Recognition’
“Handwritten text recognition (HTR) has enabled many researchers to gather textual evidence from the human record. … To build generalized models for Arabic-script manuscripts, perhaps one of the largest textual traditions in the pre-modern world, we need an approach that can improve its accuracy on unseen manuscripts and hands without linear growth in the amount of manually annotated data. We propose Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora (ACDC), taking advantage of the existence of multiple manuscripts of popular texts.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2023 proceedings.
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‘OAuth 2.0 Redirect URI Validation Falls Short, Literally’
“OAuth 2.0 requires a complex redirection trail between websites and Identity Providers (IdPs). In particular, the ‘redirect URI’ parameter included in the popular Authorization Grant Code flow governs the callback endpoint that users are routed to, together with their security tokens. The protocol specification, therefore, includes guidelines on protecting the integrity of the redirect URI. … We analyze the OAuth 2.0 specification in light of modern systems-centric attacks and reveal that the prescribed redirect URI validation guidance exposes IdPs to path confusion and parameter pollution attacks.” Find the paper and authors list in the 39th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference…
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‘How To Evaluate Blame for Gradual Types, Part 2’
“Equipping an existing programming language with a gradual type system requires two major steps. The first and most visible one in academia is to add a notation for types and a type checking apparatus. The second, highly practical one is to provide a type veneer for the large number of existing untyped libraries. … When programmers create such typed veneers for libraries, they make mistakes that persist and cause trouble. … This paper provides a first, surprising answer to this [dilemma] via a rational-programmer investigation.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the ACM on…
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‘How Profilers Can Help Navigate Type Migration’
“Sound migratory typing envisions a safe and smooth refactoring of untyped code bases to typed ones. However, the cost of enforcing safety with run-time checks is often prohibitively high, thus performance regressions are a likely occurrence. … In principal though, migration could be guided by off-the-shelf profiling tools. To examine this hypothesis, this paper follows the rational programmer method and reports on the results of an experiment on tens of thousands of performance-debugging scenarios via seventeen strategies for turning profiler output into an actionable next step.” Find the paper and authors list in the proceedings of the ACM on Programming…
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‘Content-Based Search for Deep Generative Models’
“The growing proliferation of customized and pretrained generative models has made it infeasible for a user to be fully cognizant of every model in existence. To address this need, we introduce the task of content-based model search: given a query and a large set of generative models, finding the models that best match the query. As each generative model produces a distribution of images, we formulate the search task as an optimization problem to select the model with the highest probability of generating similar content as the query.” Find the paper and authors list in SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Conference Papers.
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‘Accomodating User Expressivity While Maintaining Safety for a Virtual Alcohol Misuse Counselor’
“Client-centered counseling, in which individuals are prompted to talk about their behavior, is the standard treatment for Alcohol misuse. However, open-ended conversations with virtual agent counselor raise potential safety concerns if the agent misunderstands and provides erroneous advice. … We present a hybrid dialog system that uses a machine-learning model to generate responses to individual client speech combined with a rule-based approach to transition through structured counseling sessions.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents.
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‘Augmented Reality as a Visualization Technique for Scholarly Publications in Astronomy: An Empirical Evaluation’
“We present a mixed methods user study evaluating augmented reality (AR) as a visualization technique for use in astronomy journal publications. This work is motivated by the highly spatial nature of scientific visualizations employed in astronomy. … In this 52-person user study, we evaluate two AR approaches … as spatial 3D visualization techniques, as compared to a baseline 3D rendering on a phone. We identify a significant difference in mental and physical workload between the two AR conditions in men and women.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 2023 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics proceedings.
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‘Conversational Assessment of Mild Cognitive Impairment with Virtual Agents’
“Over 55 million adults worldwide have dementia, a syndrome characterized by deterioration in cognitive functioning. Screening for mild cognitive impairment is important to identify dementia early to facilitate diagnosis and initiate treatment that may modify the disease trajectory. However, standard cognitive screening tools are time-consuming, require expert administration, and make people feel as if they are being tested and are thus potentially stigmatizing. … We explored cognitive ability assessments using virtual agents, in which assessments are made during conversational dialogues.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual…
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‘Changing Parent Attitudes Towards HPV Vaccination by Including Adolescents in Multiparty Counseling Using Virtual Agents’
“Parental permission is required for medical care for children, and decisions may be made without incorporating children’s views, even for adolescents. We explore the impact of including adolescents in virtual agent-based multiparty health counseling to promote Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. … We found significant pre-post increases in parent intent to vaccinate their adolescent for both versions of the agent.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents.
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‘A Unified Approach for Resilience and Causal Responsibility With Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and LP Relaxations’
“What is a minimal set of tuples to delete from a database in order to eliminate all query answers? This problem is called ‘the resilience of a query’ and is one of the key algorithmic problems underlying various forms of reverse data management, such as view maintenance, deletion propagation and causal responsibility. A long-open question is determining the conjunctive queries (CQs) for which resilience can be solved in PTIME. We shed new light on this problem by proposing a unified Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation.” Find the paper and authors list in the ACM on Management of Data conference proceedings.
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When it comes to building more resilient structures, it takes ‘a whole profession,’ Northeastern professor says
CDM Smith Professor and chair of civil and environmental engineering Jerome Hajjar received both the AISC Special Achievement Award and the SSRC Beedle Award at the recent AISC annual conference, delivering a keynote to several thousand attendees on sustainable and resilient structural systems.
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‘Through the Looking Glass: The Role of Virtual Mirrors in Shaping Empathy in Virtual Reality Perspective Taking’
“In this study, we explored the effect of seeing one’s avatar in a virtual mirror during a virtual reality (VR) perspective taking experience. Participants were divided into two groups, with one experiencing the VR environment with the presence of a mirror showcasing their avatar and the other without. … However, a notable difference emerged in terms of empathy; participants who viewed their avatars in the mirror exhibited reduced empathic responses. These findings illuminate the nuanced dynamics of self-representation in virtual environments.” Find the paper and list of authors in the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous…
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‘Exploring the Indian Political YouTube Landscape: A Multimodal Multi-Task Approach’
“Social media profoundly influences all facets of our lives, including politics. Political parties, politicians, and media outlets have strategically cultivated their social media presence to engage with the public. However, with the advent of freely available Internet services in India, there has been a rising proliferation in the community of independent content creators on YouTube, with many getting millions of views per video. In this study, we present a novel multimodal dataset of videos, taken from 20 independent and influential content creators. … By introducing this novel dataset, we aim to stimulate further investigation within the domains of opinion dissemination…
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‘Distributed Cognition Approach to Understanding Compensatory Calendaring Cognitive Systems of Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment’
“While consumer digital calendars are widely used for appointment reminders, they do not fulfill all of the compensatory functions that are supported by calendars designed for cognitive rehabilitation therapies. … We employed a Distributed Cognition framework to elucidate how older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and their care partners manage calendaring details when supported by a traditional rehabilitation calendar. … We used a Distributed Cognition framing to articulate information flows and breakdowns in participants’ calendaring systems.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence proceedings.
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‘”Why Did You Say That?”: Understanding Explainability in Conversational AI Systems for Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment’
“As Conversational AI systems evolve, their user base widens to encompass individuals with varying cognitive abilities, including older adults facing cognitive challenges like Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Current systems, like smart speakers, struggle to provide effective explanations for their decisions or responses. This paper argues that the expectations and requirements for AI explanations for older adults with MCI differ significantly from conventional Explainable AI (XAI) research goals.” Find the article and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing & Ambient Intelligence.
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‘Virtual AIVantage: Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhanced VR Interview Preparation Among Underrepresented Professionals’
“Technical interviews, a cornerstone of the hiring process for computer science (CS) jobs, often prove to be particularly stressful for individuals from underrepresented backgrounds in CS circles, including women and people of color. The heightened stress and pressure can negatively affect these individuals’ sense of belonging in CS. This paper introduces Virtual AIVantage, an innovative tool designed to address this issue by leveraging virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize technical interview preparation for underrepresented individuals in CS.” Find the paper and authors list in the Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia.
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‘No Root Store Left Behind’
“When a root certificate authority (CA) in the Web PKI misbehaves, primary root-store operators such as Mozilla and Google respond by distrusting that CA. However, full distrust is often too broad, so root stores often implement partial distrust of roots, such as only accepting a root for a subset of domains. … We propose augmenting root stores with per-certificate programs called General Certificate Constraints (GCCs) that precisely control the trust of root certificates.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks.
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In every designed object, there is ‘a human being at the center’ — Lee Moreau’s new podcast explores just who design is for
Professor of the practice of design Lee Moreau’s new podcast, “Design As,” invites leaders in the field of design to discuss contemporary issues within their discipline and interrogate just who design belongs to or serves.